Examining the Use of a Social Media Campaign to Increase Engagement for the American Heart Association 2017 Resuscitation Science Symposium

BACKGROUND: The Resuscitation Science Symposium (ReSS) is the dedicated international forum for resuscitation science at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions. In an attempt to increase curated content and social media presence during ReSS 2017, the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) coordinated an inaugural social media campaign. METHODS AND RESULTS: Before ReSS, 8 resuscitation science professionals were recruited from a convenience sample of attendees at ReSS 2017. Each blogger was assigned to either a morning or an afternoon session, responsible for “live tweeting” with the associated hashtags #ReSS17 and #AHA17. Twitter analytics from the 8 bloggers were collected from November 10 to 13, 2017. The primary outcome was Twitter impressions. Secondary outcomes included Twitter engagement and Twitter engagement rate. In total, 8 bloggers (63% male) generated 591 tweets that garnered 261 050 impressions, 8013 engagements, 928 retweets, 1653 likes, 292 hashtag clicks, and a median engagement rate of 2.4%. Total engagement, likes, and hashtag clicks were highest on day 2; total impressions were highest on day 3, and retweets were highest on day 4. Total impressions were highly correlated with the total number of tweets (r=0.87; P=0.005) and baseline number of Twitter followers for each blogger (r=0.78; P=0.02). CONCLUSION: In this inaugural social media campaign for the 2017 American Heart Association ReSS, the degree of online engagement with this content by end users was quite good when evaluated by social media standards. Benchmarks for end‐user interactions in the scientific community are undefined and will require further study.